Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce (e-commerce) that allows consumers to directly purchase goods or services from a merchant or retailer over the internet. Merchants may provide a website or mobile application that allows consumers to purchase the merchant's products or services. One drawback associated with online shopping is that consumers are usually unable to sample the product or service prior to purchasing the product or service. For example, many online clothing retailers do not allow consumers to try on an item of clothing prior purchasing the item of clothing.
In order to address the aforementioned drawbacks, some merchants provide return policies, which may allow a consumer to purchase an item, sample the item, and return the item if the consumer is dissatisfied with the item. However, returning an item may increase costs for the consumer. The consumer may need to contact the merchant, visit a post office or shipping center, pay return shipping costs, and wait for a replacement, online store credit, or a refund. Some merchants have more generous or favorable return policies to compensate for the aforementioned drawbacks, which may provide for free return shipping. However, the generous or favorable return policies do not account for time costs associated with shipping the return item and time costs associated with receiving a refund. Furthermore, most of the generous or favorable return policies do not account for the environmental costs associated with shipping the items between the merchant and consumer.
Moreover, returning an item may increase costs for the merchant. As mentioned previously, many returns require additional shipping costs to be borne by the merchant. In addition, returns may involve manual labor for processing and restocking the returned items, which may increase overhead costs associated with inventory management and processing refunds. Furthermore, many returned items may not be resold to other consumers or may require refurbishment in order to be resold to other consumers.
Online clothing retailers often have relatively high return rates due to the difficulty that many consumers have with finding properly fitting and/or comfortable clothes. Many consumers have difficulty finding properly fitting and/or comfortable clothes due to constraints associated with standardized clothing sizes. The standardized clothing sizes take into account the combinations of body measurements of the general population in order to allow clothing manufacturers to mass produce items of clothing. However, the standardized clothing sizes are often represented by a single number, which may not account for consumers whose combination of body measurements are outside of the typical combinations of body measurements of the general population. Additionally, some body measurements were not taken into account when the standardized clothing sizes where developed by the various standards bodies. Furthermore, standardized clothing sizes developed by different standards bodies may be incompatible with each other. Moreover, the standardized clothing sizes do not account for the subjective preferences for clothing types, styles, etc., held by many consumers.
The aforementioned drawbacks of the standardized clothing sizes may be exacerbated by clothing manufacturers that deviate from the standards. As a result of various cultural pressures, most notably vanity sizing, many individual clothing manufacturers have drifted substantially away from the standardized clothing sizes, and thus, most clothing sold today has very little connection to the standardized clothing sizes. Instead, most manufactures now follow the more loosely defined standards known as catalog sizes, which may vary even among different styles of the same type of garment. Currently, some clothing manufacturers label clothing items with sizing information that is inaccurate (e.g., pants item listing waist size as “36” when it is actually a 34 inch circumference), insufficient (e.g., pants item that only includes waist and inseam sizes, but not leg diameter or circumference), or misleading (e.g., pants item listing waist size as “34” when it is really a 36 inch circumference). Furthermore, the sizing information provided by the various clothing manufacturers is often contradictory when compared to one another. These drawbacks may result in consumer frustration, which in turn, may result in increased returns for online clothing merchants.